Intandem to Launch Cosmonaut Movie at AFM

'Gagarin ' centers on man's first space mission

LONDON — Intandem Films has added “Gagarin — First in Space” to its sales slate at AFM, where the pic will have its market premiere.

The $10 million movie centers on Yuri Gagarin, the Russian cosmonaut who was the first human being to venture into space in 1961. The film has been timed to mark the 80th anniversary next year of Gagarin’s birth. He died in a mysterious jet fighter crash in 1968. It has a running time of 108 minutes, the exact amount of time Gagarin spent in space orbiting the Earth.

The film was produced by Oleg Kapanets and Igor Tolstunov for Kremlin Films, and is directed by Pavel Parkhomenko. It stars Yaroslav Zhalnin, Mikhail Pilippov and Viktor Proskurin.

Kapanets said: “People are increasingly fascinated by space travel as it becomes more of a reality (for ordinary folk), and this is the story of where it all began.”

This would be an awesome start to make a Russian “Right Stuff” movie. When I was a kid, there was a magazine called Soviet Life published here, but the only time I saw it a my local drug store (where we always went to buy our magazines and comics in those days) was when it featured an issue on their cosmonauts and space program. You could see their training methods were less sophisticated compared to ours, but seeing their rockets clearly for the first time was exciting for me as a kid and Space Nut.